Chatlio commands for the Slack operators

Chatlio Commands are special instructions you type into your Slack client to let you govern the behavior and configuration of Chatlio from within Slack. It’s a quick and easy way to perform many of your common Chatlio tasks, such as for instance turning the widget on/off or check on status. Read on for details.

When you want to turn Chatlio on or off without trusting the automatic presence detection, you can use /chatlio off as an override. When turned off, your visitors will see the Chatlio widget in offline mode to let your customers leave you a message, or, if you have configured, not be shown at all.

If you do not want Chatlio to automatically detect presence, you can use /chatlio manual-mode to disable it. When in manual-mode, the Chatlio widget will not switch to offline mode if nobody on your team is there to respond. To turn Chatlio off, you need to use /chatlio off or use an operating hours schedule.

To make sure you never miss a message from your visitors – e.g. if you’re multitasking while chatting – you can enable extra @channel notifications. This will prepend all incoming messages to a dedicated channel with @channel , which is a Slack feature that will trigger notifications to all members of that channel.
Enabling this can result in a lot of notifications on a busy day, so use with care!

Note Slack recently released a @here feature which is similar to @channel but limits notifications to the channel members that are currently online. This is a better fit for this Chatlio command but there is a bug in the Slack backend stopping us from using it. As soon as possible, we will switch to using @here rather than @channel .

When response reminders are turned on Chatlio will ping you repeatedly until someone on your team has responded. This can be a great help to ensure you don’t miss any incoming chats. The notifications are sent every 60 seconds by default and stop after 5 minutes or as soon as the visitor gets a reply. Response reminders are on by default. To configure the notification frequency, visit the settings tab on the Chatlio Dashboard.

You can configure Chatlio to turn on/off on a scheduling reflecting your hours of operation. Set up your schedule here. Not every day is the same though, and there might be times when you want to turn the regular schedule on or off. You can do this straight from Slack with the op-hours-schedule command (using the Chatlio dashboard works too of course). Operating hours schedule is off by default.

If you prefer your main Chatlio channel to be as uncluttered as possible you can opt to skip printing visitor info there. All the meta data about your visitors is still displayed in the dedicated channel and you can always use /chatlio info to print it again. Visitor info in the main Chatlio channel is on by default.

You can require users to enter their name and email prior to chatting. When enabled, new visitors to your Chatlio-enabled site will first be prompted for their name and email before starting to chat. Once entered, they will not be asked to enter their information again.
More info

Banning a visitor means marking them as unable to chat with you. We sincerely hope you will never need this, but the internet can be a wild place and a determined “troll” can be quite a nuisance to your staff. Chatlio lets you ban and unban visitors. When a visitor is banned they will see your Chatlio chat widget just like anyone else but none of their messages will be delivered to you in Slack. In other words, the “troll” will never know they have been banned.

To ban a visitor when in their dedicated channel: /chatlio ban

To ban a visitor from the Chatlio main channel: /chatlio ban <their-handle>

Often times during a chat you need to ask the visitor for some additional piece of information, perhaps so you can call them up or email them with a follow-up form your second-line support staff. For this, Chatlio provides the /chatlio ask command. You can query for any number of attributes and for each the visitor will see a text entry field inside their browser. The information they enter is added to the visitor record Chatlio stores, making it available for further processing in your backend systems.

To ask a visitor for their email: /chatlio ask email

To ask a visitor for their phone and fax numbers: /chatlio ask phone, fax

To ask a visitor for the best time to call them back: /chatlio ask best time to call

By default Chatlio will label messages sent to the widget and your visitor with “Support”. This works fine for most use cases (and can be customized to your liking in your widget config ), but some prefer a more personal approach and use the first name of the the Slack operator that is sending the response.

When enabled, all messages sent from Slack to your web site visitors will see the first name and the first letter of the last name of your operator, e.g. “Doug H.”.

To enable: /chatlio operator-name

Issue again to toggle.

In the widget config you can make additional changes to Chatlios behavior with regards to avatars. You can upload a “team avatar” and configure how it is used, e.g. to show a team avatar before a chat starts and then switch to using the operator avatar when chatting. See the dashboard for further details.

If you wish to notify a colleague on your team about a conversation you’ve had with a visitor to your site it’s often convenient to loop them in by sending them a chat transcript.
If you need to process the chat transcript further, we also include a JSON version of the chat transcript as an attachment.

The name of the operator involved in the conversation is indicated with their first name and the first letter of their surname. Chatlio fetches this information from the Slack profile of the operator so make sure your profile is set to the values you wish the reader to see here.

To avoid getting drowned by too many visitors all wanting to chat, you can set how many concurrent conversations Chatlio will accept.
When the current conversation count goes above your threshold, Chatlio will be set to “offline mode” for new visitors to your site. In offline mode, Chatlio will ask visitors for their email and a message so you can get back to them (you can also configure Chatlio to stay hidden when in offline mode, if that suites you better).
Ongoing conversations will not be affected by throttling, so if you have 16 chats going on and set throttling to 9, you will still have the old 16 chats but no new chats can be started until the count drops below 9.

When using conversation throttling it is important to use /chatlio end or /chatlio discard to make sure that the current chats counter stay up to date. For throttling purposes, Chatlio will consider a conversation as “inactive” after 15 minutes of inactivity or until archived.

When a new chat starts, Chatlio stores some basic meta information about your visitor: locaiton in the world, where they are on your site, the browser they are using etc. At the beginning of each conversation, this information is printed in Slack along with their first message. If your site uses the Chatlio javascript API to augment the meta data about the visitor, this is also included of course.
If you ever want to query Chatlio for the current info about a visitor, issue this command:

Print visitor meta info: /chatlio info

Chatlio is a 3rd party Slack Experience. It is not created by,
affiliated with, or supported by Slack Technologies, Inc.